Monday, October 05, 2009

Eating Our Dogfood: Welcome To Our Collaboratory

I’ve been with our new company for just about six months now and in
this compressed timeframe I’ve grown by leaps and bounds surrounded by
very capable people who are looking to move the industry forward. We
believe that “social media” (for the lack of a better phrase) isn’t
merely the latest communication channel nor a fad but will in fact
alter the way business gets done. In order for this to happen, a
transformation must take place deep within the organization which
manifests itself in nearly every business function. The transformation will
result in a business becoming a social business—one that is
connected both inwardly and out, and benefits from this in measurable
ways. So when it came to our own "Website", our intention was to lead
by example. Welcome to our Collaboratory, it’s less a website and more
of a digital ecosystem where we will aggregate our collective thinking
and engage all levels of participants from clients, to peers to
individuals in other ecosystems. The first thing you may notice in
our Collaboratory is a somewhat unconventional homepage. I’ve talked before
about the idea about attention moving from “pages” and earning trust in
streams.

This is exactly what you’ll
see when you visit the Collaboratory. You’ll be greeted by a living,
breathing, visual representation of our activities. You’ll be able to
see what we tweet, how we work (we currently use 37 Signals Basecamp
and Highrise to collaborate), when we signal internally (we use Yammer)
and when and what we blog. You’ll even be able to see when we e-mail
and to which organizations we e-mail to. Of course we’ve thought this
through and can control what gets shared and how, but the concept is to
provide a window into how we operate. It’s a glimpse into our
“hivemind” you could say.

The stream constantly updates in real time
and makes for less of a homepage and more of a dynamic representation
or our organization. Other features that our site includes is a
calender of events so you can see where we are giving talks and
participating within the industry. All content from blog posts to our
events can be subscribed to via an RSS feed. The Collaboratory will act
as a meta aggregator pulling in all of our content from blog posts, to
videos to bookmarks and you’ll be able to share your thoughts on
anything that gets posted. Additionally, there has been quite a bit of
chatter in the industry about the idea of Social Business Design and
even requests that we firmly define what this is. We’ve also written a whitepaper on the topic and have defined it in short as the following:

“Social Business Design is The intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.”

Our
goal with the collaboratory is to provide a value exchange, This means
we are tasking ourselves to provide value to our ecosystem and expect
to receive value back. But the exchange is not merely two-way, our hope
is that all constituents in our ecosystem benefit from the experience
we help facilitate here. This is what value exchange means. The
Collaboratory was designed specifically for this—leveraging a Wordpress
foundation for rapid content updates and integrating all kinds of
technologies which make the stream, feeds and interactions possible.
It’s designed to be content rich as opposed to heavy on the special
effects, and made to evolve and scale as our needs change. We’re emphasizing substance over flash. So welcome to our
Collaboratory and feel free to eat our own dogfood along with us. It
might not sound glamorous, but we’re counting on your participation as
we navigate the course toward creating more socially calibrated
organizations. See you in the stream.